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How mission selection moved into the world
Grand Theft Auto began as a project called Race ’n’ Chase, with an ambition to create a living city: an environment that reacted to players and gave their actions consequences. The game’s direction developed through collaboration and experimentation at DMA Design, rather than through one clearly documented decision by a single designer. In a GamesRadar+ retrospective, team members described the project shifting from a cops-and-robbers driving game toward a car-based crime game and sandbox.
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Mission selection changed as the game took shape. In the earlier version, players chose their next mission from a sub-menu. The team felt that returning to a menu pulled players out of the city, so they looked for ways to make mission starts part of the environment instead. The resulting triggers included payphones, characters and vehicles. GamesRadar+’s account of the development describes the change as effectively bringing level selection into the game world.
Paul Farley, a designer on the game, recalled the phonebox idea this way: “Then we had the idea of allowing the player to pick up missions by visiting phoneboxes, and it became much more free and open.” That recollection appears in The Guardian’s 2015 interview with Farley.
#1 Best Overall
- STUNNING VISUALS — Enhanced levels of fidelity and performance with new graphics modes featuring up to 4K resolution, up to 60 frames per second, HDR options, ray tracing, improved texture quality, and more
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- Please note that although this game is Region Free or Region Unlocked and will work on all systems, this is the European version and may differ from the local version in age rating, labeling or instructions.
Why the city made a better front end
A menu makes mission selection explicit, but it also asks players to step outside the place they are exploring. Putting mission starts in the city connected two actions—getting around and finding what to do next—so the world could serve as both setting and interface. The design choice was therefore not simply to make a larger map: it was to make the city the route into the game’s missions.
The sources support immersion as a key motive. They do not establish that the exact sentence in the supplied headline was spoken by a particular developer. The 2006 GamesRadar+ retrospective supports the related point that the team found the menu or front end boring, while Farley’s 2015 account specifically credits phoneboxes with making the game “much more free and open.” Neither account verifies “we didn’t want to have to build a front end” as a direct quotation.
Rank #2
- Grand Theft Auto III: It all starts in Liberty City. With the revolutionary freedom to go anywhere and jack anyone, Grand Theft Auto III puts the center of the criminal underworld at your fingertips, if you have enough guts to take it.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Welcome to the 1980s. From the decade of big hair and pastel suits comes the story of one man's rise to the top of the criminal pile.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Five years ago, Carl 'CJ' Johnson escaped the haze of Los Santos, San Andreas...a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs, and corruption.
The open structure exceeded the team’s initial expectations
Moving mission starts into the city also made it natural for players to spend time there without immediately taking on a mission. Farley said the programmers had not anticipated people exploring for hours; the engine had not originally been designed to run indefinitely. That recollection captures a gap between the team’s expectations for play and the open-ended behavior the design came to invite. It does not show that the team set out with a fully formed plan for unlimited exploration.
The cities themselves were fictional interpretations rather than literal copies. Farley said the designers drew on the essence of Manhattan, San Francisco and Miami for Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City, respectively. The city setting gave the mission system a coherent place to operate, while those inspirations helped define the distinct urban identities of the game’s locations.
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Rank #3
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A collaborative design, not a single-origin story
The move from a menu to in-world mission triggers is one clear example of the game’s evolving design, but the retrospective accounts resist reducing Grand Theft Auto to one decisive breakthrough. Brian Baglow recalled the initial ambition as “The original idea was to create a game based in a living city.” Project leader Keith Hamilton summarized the team’s interactive ambition with “Everything had to be interactive.” Mike Dailly described it as a “true ‘team-designed’ game.” Together, these accounts frame the open structure as part of broader experimentation with an active, responsive city.
Other features emerged through the same experimental approach, but they should not be confused with the reason mission selection moved into the city. The clearest explanation in the accounts is practical and experiential: the sub-menu broke immersion, while phoneboxes and other in-world triggers let players stay within the city as they found missions.
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Rank #4
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